Inner light - 'a universal experience'

'Inner light' has many names - Param Prakash in the Ramayana, Sheikinah in the Zohar, Divya Jyoti in the Upanishads, Vergo in the Veda's, Amitabha in Buddhism, Noor-e-Ilahi in the Koran, Chandna in the Sikh tradition. 

Ever since humanity sort to express it's journey on this earth, people have revered and honoured the sacred.  Personal, intimate experiences of inner light have always been recorded - symbolically and allegorically during ancient civilisations, through music, art and song, in myths and legends, scripture and sacred text, in contemporary autobiographical accounts.

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Regardless of the name, the manner, culture or language it is expressed in, all of the world's main religions are united through a tradition of transcendent inner light that is universally associated with 'higher consciousness experiences'.

It is documented as being a 'timeless and eternal', self-awareness that expands well beyond the limitations of our physical selves - our ordinary thinking minds and personalities. 

Throughout the ages prophets, mystics, saints and sages have all celebrated a common tale - our human experience with 'inner light' is certainly no metaphor as sceptics have suggested.  Rather, it is a very real and often life changing encounter.


'The light that shines above the heavens and above this world, the light that shines in the highest world, beyond which there are no others, that is the light that shines in the hearts of men'.

- the Chandoya Upanishad

'If they say to you, 'Where did you come from?' say to them, 'We came from the light, the place where the light came into being on it's own accord and established itself and became manifest through their image'.

- Jesus

'Allah is the light
of the heavens
and the earth'.

- the Koran

'Within the domain of our mind
there is a Buddha of Enlightenment
who sends forth a powerful light'.

- The Sutra of Hui-Neng

'If I were to spend years and years imagining how to invent anything so beautiful, I could not do it, and I do not even know how I should try, for, even in it's whiteness and radiance alone, it exceeds all that we can imagine. It is not a radiance which dazzles, but a soft whiteness and an infused radiance'.

- St Teresa of Avila


'Then his soul is a lamp whose light is steady,
for it burns in a shelter where no winds come'

- Bhagavad Gita

'I entered into the innermost part of myself and I saw with the eye of my soul, such as it was, above the same eye of my soul, above my mind, the light unchangeable...He who knows truth knows that light, and he who knows that light, knows eternity'.

- St Augustine

'He who in early days was unwise
but later found wisdom,
he sheds light over the world
like that of the moon when free from clouds'.

- Dhammapada